August 2018, arsenal cinema

Guest: DAAD Grantholder João Viana

OUR MADNESS, 2018

Portuguese filmmaker João Viana (*1966) is currently the guest of the DAAD’s Artists in Berlin program. In his two features, he deals with the effects of colonial history on the post-colonial present in Africa in a formally idiosyncratic manner. In A BATALHA DE TABATÔ (The Battle of Tabatô, 2013), a former solder travels with his daughter to the village where her marriage to a musician is supposed to take place. The journey through Guinea-Bissau is overshadowed by demons of the past that haven’t left the old man in peace since the civil war. OUR MADNESS (2018) also operates with magnificent visual compositions in black and white and red. A woman from Mozambique finds her husband and son after fleeing from a psychiatric institution. Yet both of them disappear again and again, just like the strange hospital bed airplane and the statue of wire she comes across. A dreamlike film akin to a trance, with the characteristics of post-trauma. (bik) (28.8.)